


that bells should joyful ring to tell

by gallpall



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Bisexuals in Space, Canonical Character Death, F/F, I made myself sad, Really serious speculation and guessing about timeframes on my part, This is rated M for dark themes, ft. stuff i totally made up about Alfred and Anastasia, not for sexual content altho there are some coarse jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:34:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27427270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallpall/pseuds/gallpall
Summary: It was nauseating, but it was Cristabel. Mercymorn believed she could siphon time itself just to see that woman’s eyes light up the way they did, like an autumn breeze that whirred warmly through anyone who looked at her.Resurrection-era Lyctor shenanigans, told from Mercymorn's standpoint. Please read all relevant chapter warnings, this gets angsty and heavy near the end!!
Relationships: Mercymorn the First/Cristabel Oct
Comments: 16
Kudos: 36





	1. Chapter 1

“Tea??”

The lively voice that woke Mercymorn was her cavalier’s, accompanied by a musical rapping at the wall. Mercy’s eyes opened into murderous slits and her lips parted like slices of dried grapefruit, no doubt to release innumerable curses.

Cristabel was already gone. She left a trail of music, humming that same hymn-like melody she’d banged onto the doorway like an irritating little songbird, her boots clacking on ornate parquet floors.

Mercymorn turned her pillow to the cold side and huffed indignantly. She had slept precious little, not more than twelve hours combined in the last _week_ of work – and in this moment, it seemed that Cristabel respected her diligence so very little.

After a few minutes of futility and staring at the ceiling, Mercymorn succumbed to the misery of being awake and drug herself to the dining hall. She wore a plush robe of pale amaranth, and a frown like the end of days. With her she carried no less than three notebooks, and a slim pair of reading glasses that, as she affixed them to her face, only served to deaden her glare.

It was nowhere near time for breakfast, and no sensible disciple would rise before Dominicus did, not even to glorify God. Cristabel and Alfred were not sensible disciples. They were positively _exuberant_ – she more so than him, though Alfred followed her like a puppy and mimicked her like a parrot. Mercymorn woke to an empty bed often, Cristabel having kissed her ‘good morning’ and gone to do... whatever it was someone might do at the sweaty ass-crack of dawn.

So, it was no surprise to Mercymorn when she entered that grand glass room and Alfred’s boisterous laugh echoed from it like yet another siren on an otherwise siren-less morning. Mercy, left out on whatever joke Cristabel had made, joined in with the most vitriolic laugh anyone in the system could muster.

“Ah hah ha heh!!” she crackled, making sure the chair she pulled out screeched unpleasantly against glass tiles. The room was massive, and the three of them were a strange, silent sight. Mercymorn opened a notebook to review yesterday’s work. To Cristabel’s infinite credit, she ignored the mockery and went to make Mercy some tea.

Alfred sat timidly with his hands clasped around a steaming mug of coffee, making eye contact with absolutely no one. After no more than ninety seconds, Mercy looked up from her reports, took off her glasses, and heaved a long sigh.

“What is the point of rising at such a preposterous hour? Why do you _insist_ on it?”

“Comradery, Mercy,” Cristabel replied smoothly, without hesitation. “Some people enjoy it.”

“I do love to _mingle_ , Cris, but this is absurd. I can’t focus on my work. I want to sleep.”

“You can go back to bed if you like.”

“If only I’d thought of such a thing!!”

“I’m sorry,” Cristabel said brightly, with not a hint of pity. She placed in front of the Necromancer a hot cup of breakfast tea, sweetened with honey to the point it was more sugar than leaf. Mercymorn took it and found herself immediately soothed by the warmth at her fingertips.

She looked up at Cristabel, whose hand grazed Mercymorn’s nape and slid beneath her robe to rest on her shoulder like an impossibly instant pain-relief patch. Her gaze met Cristabel’s, and those eyes like hearthsides made her smile and trill briefly in private gratitude.

Alfred cleared his throat, and Mercy’s blood pressure skyrocketed again.

“My brother has always been an early-riser, too. He just prefers to keep to himself.”

“For good fucking reason. That prick would wake up on the rotten side of the bed even if he rose at noon.”

Cristabel tapped her on the cheek for that, kissed where her palm had been, then scurried away. Mercymorn pretended to flinch at the sweet gesture, screwing her mouth and nose to the side to conceal a blush.

“You’re not wrong,” Alfred agreed at a whisper, peering out into the hall before he did so.

Mercymorn _humph’d_ , and squinted to study Alfred’s face. Everything about it laid in contrast to Augustine –where his brother had deep recesses beneath his eyes, Alfred’s face sported full, friendly cheeks and a well-sculpted nose. His hair was a light brown, gracefully flowing and age appropriate. Augustine’s head, as Mercy had once told Cristabel in confidence, resembled _‘_ a cold marble statue with a _terrible_ combover.’

“You are so much handsomer than he. If I were the Emperor, I would pick only the loveliest disciples. So it’s beyond me why He keeps you both here, at Canaan. Surely Augustine could find some other planet to fuck off to and—” Mercy gestured with irreverent confusion here— _“do the work.”_

“It’s not so simple,” Cristabel retorted, her voice saccharine, though it belied a sense of adulation. “He needs us all here. We are His breath, and His bones.”

With Cristabel out of eyeshot, Mercymorn looked to the man across the table and rolled her eyes extravagantly. Alfred’s lips twitched into a fleeting, nervous smile, and then his face went blank. He sipped coffee, and Mercymorn put her glasses back on without any more fuss.

***

In those years, Mercymorn _worked_. Cristabel kept her close, kept her grounded and kept her as distracted as someone with that kind of piercing intensity could be. Mercymorn would crawl into bed after late nights of studying, of planning and coordinating and building in service (not of God, but of her own sanity) and she would try her damnedest to not stir her cavalier.

Cristabel always woke up, though. She would curl in tight against her, chin nestled into her necromancer’s scapula. She would kiss Mercymorn’s ears, which were often pink with indignation, and talk or sing to her until the pair of them drifted to sleep.

Mercymorn came around with Alfred, too – she began to accept him, to tolerate Cristabel’s hopeless fawning, if only to see her lover happy around some man other than the Emperor. It was nauseating, but it was Cristabel. Mercymorn believed she could siphon time itself just to see that woman’s eyes light up the way they did, like an autumn breeze that whirred warmly through anyone who looked at her.

As the others arrived, Canaan House began to feel full. Not in a way that bothered Mercymorn – the house was big enough to support _more_ disciples, even with everyone home – but in a way that felt whole, felt proper. Despite various disagreements, squabbles and entanglements the likes of which could happen only in a mansion inhabited by about eighteen people, they made it work. They were family.

Mercymorn did not love them all. In fact, she _hated_ some of them. Loveday was opinionated and tenacious in the way that only the Eighth House founder felt entitled to act. The necromancer from the Seventh was infinitely more unbearable, what with her mortal precepts about the poetry of dying. Ulysses incited orgies with a frequency that made Mercy incite violence, more than once. Nigella was gorgeous, but in Mercy’s own words, ‘ _infantile and crass,_ ’ though Cassiopeia would have dunked her in the River if she heard such an expression.

She learned to live with Augustine. He was a fucking evil excuse for a man, and she still didn’t understand why the Necrolord Prime would ever want such a disgrace in His presence. ‘Reborn’ or not, Mercy believed him rancid to the core – a deceiver, a problem that would become hers someday. That didn’t stop her from fucking him, from time to time.

Amidst all the abominable work cut out for her, Mercymorn the First had taken great pleasure in the House she was consigned to create. She sketched architecture, planned logistics. She enlisted Cristabel’s technical skills to build great scale models of temples and cities, of the vast stations each would be constructed within. Cristabel would unveil them to the Emperor with complete and utter sycophancy that made Mercymorn want to hurl, and He would put forefinger to chin and exclaim, “Hm.” Cristabel would break into hysterics with His approval.

Their House was the first to be populated, and proudly so. Cristabel and Mercy made that memorable expedition alone, traversed that wide, dangerous distance and sowed the seeds that would be their House. They were too far for the Emperor to touch them there. In the terror of open space, suits tethered together with fortified red net, they anchored a gay little flag within the planet's cold, swirling orbit which read:

“the 8th house

 ~~here you go john you rude ba~~ **Loyal To the King Undying**

mm & c were here”

And those were the lovely years.


	2. Chapter 2

The lovely years were timeless. They were brief, and they were twenty years or a thousand or they were an instant. Their family did not age – John would not allow it, or so He claimed. And so, the day He spotted one (1) new wrinkle on Augustine’s crime-splattered, inter-galactically ugly face, God interrupted libations and divinely decreed: “Well, that won’t do.”

And thus began the Lyctor Trials, which Mercymorn thought was a very silly thing to call what was essentially ‘God School.’ Cytherea had clapped meagerly, no doubt excited about guaranteed immortality since it seemed as though she might wither like a hyacinth should she so much as wander outside the greenhouse.

Everyone had their own methods of research. Some of them jumped in headfirst – Cassy or her cavalier did not surface for _months_ – and some seemed more ambivalent. They fought about it, but most of the time, everyone still came to dinner and the afterparties continued. Some evenings were quiet, contemplative, secretive. Furtive glances across the table, avoidant eyes and reticent mouths around the punch bowl or the sauna. If ‘discord’ had ever existed among the disciples, the Lyctor Trials invented it.

Mercymorn worked alone. She found this grand gesture to be tedium, a diversion from the piles and piles of work she had already burdened herself with. Cristabel seemed to have her own, more devout methods of research, which, if you asked Mercy, involved spending a little too much time with the Emperor.

***

She took a walk through the house one evening, to get her mind off whatever Cristabel might be ‘learning,’ and found herself in the pool room. A starkly naked Loveday Heptane was swimming laps, and Cytherea sat upright in a plastic chair, wearing a crooked sunhat. She was giggling nonsensically, a pamphlet of ballads in her lap.

“For John’s sake Cytherea, we are _inside_. Your hat is insipid and it makes us all look as such,” Mercymorn wailed, exclamation points bouncing off the walls of the natatorium.

“I think it makes me look debonair,” Cytherea crooned. Loveday began to tread water and blow large, hurgling bubbles on its surface, eyes locked on Mercymorn like an alligator’s warning. Mercymorn ignored it.

“If anyone else joins our ranks, God forbid they do, I am invoking seniority and instituting a dress code,” she said. “Perhaps you wouldn’t look so fragile if you branched out from those horrible baby blues. You’re a _neonate,_ little Cythy. Do try not to look it.”

At that, Loveday emerged from the pool, droplets of saltwater the only buffer between her nude, imposing form and Mercymorn’s peony-pink tracksuit.

“Fuck off,” she said, and Mercy hooted—just once—with laughter.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take orders from a schoolyard bully,” Mercy said shrilly, quite pleased with herself.

“Goodness, girls! There is no need to fight over little young me,” Cytherea interrupted, calmly closing her little book. “Loveday, could you excuse us? I have… matters with Mercy.” Loveday looked disappointed, but obliged, snapping up a towel and heading to the adjacent athletics room.

Mercymorn, who knew of no such matters to be discussed, scoffed slightly, but felt herself pulled into Cytherea’s gravity as she sat down next to her. Mercymorn pursed her lips and stared after Loveday, both glad to see her go _and_ to watch her leave.

Immediately, she felt Cytherea’s near-vacant eyes on her cheek. When she turned to look, they were cool and sad and babyish.

“I need your help,” Cytherea said breathily, and when Loveday was most assuredly gone: “I don’t want to die.”

For perhaps the only time in her entire life, Mercymorn the First’s heart melted into something gelatinous and sympathetic.

***

She did help her, _extensively._ They worked together—Loveday too, though she was more a bulwark than a detective—to craft theorems and practice them in relative seclusion. It was a secret to everyone but Cristabel, from whom Mercy could not keep private even her own innards.

Months of this went by, and Mercy began to note seeing less and less of her cavalier. Cristabel was always praying, in those dizzyingly white, holy rooms of Canaan that made Mercy queasy to even think about. Whenever Cristabel hinted at her progress, Mercymorn simply nodded. She loved Cristabel dearly but was starkly aware that playing Teacher’s pet had never granted anyone eternal life.

Mercymorn chose not to talk openly of her work, not even to the study buddy whom she fondly called ‘the new kid.' Two by the names of Anastasia and Samael had joined their ranks just prior to the Seventh pair, and the Trials' Commencement. Judging by how little she’d seen or even heard of those two, Mercy surmised they weren’t anything to concern herself with.

But Anastasia came to her one day, when Mercymorn was tucked alone into the remote corner of a brightly lit, white-cubicled room, content to speak to absolutely no one.

“I am occupied,” Mercy said through her teeth in a bitingly singsong voice.

“Alfred is dead,” Anastasia said emptily, her eyes indiscernible.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (cw: implied suicide and suicide ideation, smoking)

Alfred _was_ , incontrovertibly, dead.

And freshly so, too – his corpse was a heap of hardly recognizable meat, the result of challenging a spirit ward in the way only a man seeking death might. Mercymorn herself was in a squawking state of shock, but her primary concern was Cristabel. Her cavalier hadn’t made it from her prayer room in time to see the body—Mercy wouldn’t have allowed it, in any case—before John had closed the doors, all but demanding privacy for Himself and Augustine.

Cristabel fell to the floor in the hallway, sobbing gently and singing. Mercymorn felt helpless to console her, but Cristabel was disturbingly serene and she barely trembled during her prayers that night. Mercymorn could not convince the cavalier to rise for breakfast the following day.

That last look Mercymorn saw from Augustine, as he was left with John to mourn, was cold and set in stone, like a marble sculpture shut in a morgue.

***

The arrangements were made swiftly. What had happened to Alfred was foreseeable, as troubling as this was to admit. Mercymorn had often remarked in jest that Alfred wasn’t long for the world, the toilsome, cruel world which his own brother helped to wrought. The Trials had withered him, made him tuck his tail like an injured dog; even Cristabel could not sufficiently lick his wounds.

What she hadn’t expected was Augustine’s absence from the funeral. The Lord cited Augustine’s mental infirmity, but Mercymorn had _always_ known Augustine to be infirm, and that had never kept him from a sordid affair with a solid chance of sexscapades to follow. She pursed her lips anyway and let herself cry for Cristabel, who would never look into Alfred’s benevolent but shallow eyes again.

The service was the first time in a while that everyone—except Augustine—had truly come together in quite some time. Everyone was tired: breakthroughs had been frequent as of late, and most had paired off or kept to themselves. Mercymorn was among these overworked disciples and found herself sneering at anyone who wasn’t her very depressed cavalier.

Pyrrha was the only one who dared approach her at the back of the room, looking sleepless and a bit slouched considering her usual stick-in-ass posture. She came with a peace offering Mercymorn wasn’t going to refuse: a lit cigarette that Pyrrha herself had just taken an impossibly sexy drag from.

“Hullo,” Pyrrha said impassively through a long, opaque exhale. Mercymorn’s nose wrinkled and she wordlessly took the cigarette, putting it primly to her lips and pulling a shallow breath. She then extinguished it aggressively against the white glass wall and flicked it out into the corridor. Pyrrha’s brow furrowed, her eyes the shade of the menthol she’d just been denied.

“You’re perky,” Pyrrha lied, searching Mercymorn for something resembling empathy. Mercymorn was barely holding it together, but clearly not from grief. Something was frightening her, staining her face with worry rather than tears.

“And you’re _insensitive!!_ ”

“Everyone handles pain differently,” Pyrrha said, still scrutinizing, trying to dig into Mercymorn's frazzled face.

“Chain-smoking and aloofness are not healthy coping mechanisms,” Mercy shout-whispered. The little scene they were making had drawn Gideon’s attention, and his heavy stare from the pew up front had them both on edge.

“I will keep this in mind, Dr. Mercy,” Pyrrha said with that musty sense of humor.

The two of them were silent for a calculated moment. Gideon lost interest and focused back on his conversation with Cyrus and Ulysses, presumably working out a turn order for some sorrowful dick-sucking later.

Pyrra Dve looked at Mercymorn severely. Her face was resolute and solemn as she spoke.

“Gideon is close, I think. But I am closer.”

***

Mercymorn told no one of the note she found on Alfred's corpse, not even Anastasia and Valancy who helped her search it. Folded into what must have once been a hand (though it was hard to tell) was a page torn neatly from one of Cytherea’s books.

In ancient, plain print; then signed with a familiar script that made her stomach turn:

_If tolling bell I ask the cause.  
'A soul has gone to God,'  
I'm answered in a lonesome tone;  
Is heaven then so sad?_

_That bells should joyful ring to tell  
A soul had gone to heaven,  
Would seem to me the proper way  
A good news should be given._

**Alfred – God’s Breath, and God’s Bones.**   
**Cris**

On the day Alfred Quinque died, Mercymorn the First realized that Cristabel Oct was in grave fucking danger.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (in which mercy makes a Big Miss Steak, also i do not understand thalergy and at this point i am too afraid to ask)

If the Emperor was planning to assassinate His most devoted follower, Mercymorn would face God and walk backwards into the River.

In the days following his brother’s death, Augustine made himself scarce. He rarely emerged from his library—the very room Alfred had become jetsam inside of—and when he did he hung his head low, pocketed his hands and hardly spoke. Mercy knew he hadn’t caught the depression because he actually looked quite irradiated, despite his trying to hide it. On the fifth day of this hermit-y bullshit, Augustine the First left. He fucked off to that planet he should have started working on a very long time ago and he did not have the decency to leave a note on the fridge.

Mercymorn would have appreciated a note, because her life had become very strange. The tables had turned and Cristabel, in some unexpected manifestation of mourning, had become a wholesale workaholic. This was distressing primarily because for all of Cristabel’s energy, only about five percent of it had ever been reserved for the kind of intricate work she was now encouraging Mercymorn to attempt. In addition, God and Cristabel had stopped speaking entirely, and while normally Mercy wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, this had her on edge.

Mercy fathomed it like this: either God had gotten bored of Cristabel because she stopped seeking His presence, or; Cristabel had stopped seeking His presence because God had gotten bored of her. Either way, these were very silly reasons for Him to want her dead, but Mercymorn had always been a rather secular believer and couldn’t claim to understand the mysterious and possibly murderous ways in which He worked.

Meanwhile, Cristabel had Mercymorn jumping through hoops. Her cavalier would wake her in the middle of the night and _ask_ to be siphoned like it was some kind of kink (it assuredly was not). She would lead Mercymorn in reciting advanced theorems until Dominicus rose to greet them, at which point they always moved their studies to a breakfast nook. This repetitive cycle went on for a week and while it wasn’t entirely unwelcome—the theorems had begun to string together into something quite promising for the two of them—it _was_ very distracting from the threat of a potentially vengeful God.

The breakfast spot Mercymorn and her cavalier would convene in had recently been staked out as theirs with the same territorial authority as the planet they had claimed all that time ago. Cristabel potted pink and white roses at each facet of the octagonal, white-glass room. Every morning she insisted on smelling them and sighing with pure relief, as if one day they might suddenly wilt and stink the way her connection with God evidently had. Warm, radiant sun shone into that room and almost negated their self-inflicted insomnia.

“Will you humor me?” Cristabel asked one morning as she stirred sugar into her necromancer’s tea. Mercymorn quirked a brow at her—which literally anyone else would have painted as 'critical'—and heard her out.

“Come down to the laboratories with me. 14—8. I want to syndicate what we’ve been working on.”

Mercymorn thought very briefly, and then said: “That is an empty room, Cris.”

“You and I are going to fill it.”

***

She and Cristabel lifted the grate and entered that grey expanse. The room wasn’t _empty,_ not really – a single metal pedestal sat like a finish line in the back.

They did not intend to fill the room with furnishings. It would instead be a barrier impenetrable to anything that enjoyed the privilege of cellular composition. This was the culmination of their research; this was the most complex theorem Mercymorn and Cristabel had ever attempted. Theirs was a feat that John Himself insisted could not be done, which had been nearly enough to inspire Mercymorn to try. The key component was Cristabel, who today had taken Mercy’s hand, led her down the steps, placed her hand on her own shoulder and _asked_ her to try it.

They spent thirteen hours in that room. Early on, when Cristabel realized exactly how dangerous the end result would be, she penned a portent on the lab’s door, hand trembling slightly with the shock of thalergy borrowed and returned for hours on end: **_AVULSION!_**

Mercymorn did not want to take more than she needed at a time. They could have worked faster if not for this precaution, but she insisted upon it and Cristabel was happy to go at her pace. The result was a cavalier who was an endless font of giving, who retained her composure and seemed to feel very little lasting pain despite the demands being made of her body.

The demands were not subtle: Mercy would take the cells she needed and decay them to the brink of apoptosis, sometimes one at a time and sometimes in great batches, weaving them into senescence that sizzled a translucent white in the air. At the exact same time she lifted cells from Cristabel she would bombard them with entropy, which by all prior known concepts should dissipate the field’s structure but instead settled into a looming glow that eventually extended from floor to ceiling. They had started this incantation at the end of the room and worked their way forward, in the way one might sweep a gymnasium. It came together square inch by square inch, seamless and inseverable, and when they had finished, it was the most beautiful and horrible thing either of them had ever done.

This room was an explicit love letter to one another, and exhibitionism was the very foundation of Canaan House. They brought everyone to see it that night: Cytherea came first, and though she dared not test it herself, she was certainly the most impressed. Anastasia had her doubts, but eventually ceded that no matter how many bones she tossed at it, it truly could not be dispelled. Pyrrha congratulated them stoically, clearly a little miffed that Mercymorn had come up with something even more dastardly than her and Gideon’s construct.

John and Cristabel spoke, briefly and jubilantly, for the first time since Alfred’s death. Mercymorn made very sure He did not get close enough to touch Cristabel.

***

The pair finally resigned themselves to actual sleep that night, which was easy enough to do. Cristabel’s exhaustion only began to show once they were alone, and she collapsed in the bed, quivering but smiling in the safety her necromancer provided.

As they curled up together, for the first time it was Mercymorn who held her cavalier. She kissed Cristabel’s neck and sung praises into her ear, recounted the miracles they had performed and thanked her body for its givings. Together they drifted into dreaming, necromancer's hand held firmly to cavalier’s heart.

Mercymorn the First woke up the instant that heart ceased to beat.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (cw: character death, grief, suicide ideation. This is pure whump)

There are certain forms of death where the soul departs all at once.

Mercymorn was screaming, writhing over Cristabel’s body, clinging to the warmth that lingered where a soul did not. Her nails dug into skin, drew bright red blood from her former cavalier’s shoulder as she thrashed the corpse against the sheets, panicking and shaking and then covering her own mouth to muzzle her horror, lips touching blood that was not her own.

“No, no, no, no, _no_ ,”—increasing desperation, misery, dismay, anger—“no, you will not leave me behind, you will not let Him _do this_ to us”—and it _worked,_ and Mercymorn felt herself cast into the River, reaching for something, paddling along with a current that swept and tore through her body like, like _lava,_ hot and horrible and fast and she could not stop herself from clinging to the black hole that floated alongside her, that whirred and sung and embraced her and began to hoist her from the depths despite her own soul begging to stay behind in its gravity and drown, just _drown,_ but she kept _rising_ —

John stood in the doorway and flicked on the light. Mercymorn found herself back in that bedroom, heaving, sputtering. John, the absolute rat bastard, said nothing, _did_ nothing. He just looked at his disciple with sad, infinite eyes.

“Bring her back,” Mercymorn croaked, stumbling to her feet, weak and scared but imbued with an energy she did not understand, approaching Him on legs that betrayed her and brought her to her knees in front of the Lord Over the River for the first time in her life, and He said:

“You already have.”

***

Cristabel Oct was not _back._ She did not rise before the sun and tiptoe off to pray and laugh with Alfred. She did not join her necromancer for breakfast in their octagonal room, though her roses still bloomed and swayed in the sun like the day before. There was no sweetener in Mercymorn’s tea, and it grew cold and bitter and forgotten. Mercymorn crushed her reading glasses in her palm, finding that the eyes she stole no longer required her to squint.

John had explained everything to her, back in that bedroom, but what Mercymorn heard was this: she had taken so much from Cristabel in the laboratory that she had made her a martyr to her own triumph. Mercymorn the First had stripped bits of Cristabel’s body until her spirit fled from it, and then she had dragged her cavalier’s fragmented soul back to the surface and eaten it for her own.

Mercymorn would not speak to anyone that day, not even to screech. Gideon took Pyrrha later that afternoon, while every other disciple bore open witness to their sin and took _notes_. Augustine had returned and tried to gain an audience with Mercy, but John prevented it; she would have imploded him on the spot for refusing to warn her. Cytherea tried to visit, too, but Mercymorn had never seen her sister cry and refused to give her reason to. 

Instead, Mercy sat in the breakfast nook—as silent as she had ever been and would ever be—and revised her House sermons.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (cw: fictional religious fanaticism. mercy endorses weird genetics stuff!?)

  1. _For those Ordained by God with Servitude to the White Glass:_



Your presiding virtues are zeal and penitence, through practice of these may you achieve Salvation.

The King Undying demands of you the maintenance of His most Holy House. The halls and the tenets of the Eighth were founded in toil by your Saint; to desecrate them is to crystallize your Sin in the light of Dominicus.

You royal templars whose line is to pass for generations must not forget that despite your Imperial status you are but dander in the eyes of your God. Your Saint reminds you that the continuation of your heredity comes secondary to your obedience.

You ordinary children of God will labor in supplication to the Necromancer and her Cavalier, that God might spare you and your descendants might delight in the glory of Salvation.

Your duty entails the selection of individuals genetically disposed to the fulfillment of God’s endeavors in the service of Necromancers. You are in great debt to the generous Cavalier, and thereby owe him, in the very least, fair handling and understanding.

  1. _For those Ordained by God with the Capacity for Necromancy:_



Your presiding virtues are truth and mercy, through practice of these may you achieve Salvation.

Your body is a calyx in the grasp of the Lord Over the River. The Lord replenishes the cup of your Cavalier, that you might one day refill His.

To exhaust your Cavalier is to commit sacrilege. To sip from his spirit in vain is to shame your House and to intoxicate yourself with his soul is blasphemy.

In your authority your Cavalier will put targe before sword, he will sow silence in the stead of strife. You will not engage him in unnecessary dissent or in degradation. Your bond and its safekeeping worships the Lord.

You are Twin Chapels in dedication to the God of Dead Kings. You will not command your Cavalier to that which is lascivious, lavish, or lethal. If his body is to shatter, let the glass of yours fog over and become testament. Let its defiled altar linger in remembrance of your sin, that others might take admonition.

  1. _For those Ordained by God with the Burden of Cavalierism:_



Your presiding virtues are loyalty and honor, through practice of these you may achieve Salvation.

By birth you are set apart with unfathomable duty to those whose shortcomings are inverse to your own. Your body is cultivated in the image of God to serve those who inherit His gifts.

Your charge is to preserve and propel the Necromancer. You need not question her authority or drive her to action, for her interests are yours and those of the King Undying. Let God alone judge her, for you are bound in your oath. Your Faith in the Emperor shines through your intractable devotion to her.

**Know that you are without sin in the the eyes of your Saint, and it is to you this repentant Eighth House is dedicated.**


End file.
